Chris Lombardi puts defense and security under the spotlight, as he shares his takes on recent NATO and EU cooperation and provides insight into the company’s own long-term strategic partnerships in Europe.

Three trends are currently driving the global electricity sector: decarbonization, decentralization and differentiation. Utilities are making significant contributions to mitigate carbon emissions, while a technology revolution is …

It is worth underscoring that the Commission is providing a most unfortunate kick-off to an important discussion on long-term environmental issues that ultimately affect the health and well-being of all Europeans and those beyond.

Take transport and decarbonisation. This Commission is irresponsibly throwing in the towel on European decarbonisation efforts in transport by not having the courage to set any kind of longer term target for sustainable biofuel.

This is bizarre given that carbon emissions in transport – from passenger vehicles to lorries – are still one of the fastest-growing components of overall greenhouse-gas emissions. And the types of biofuel that are responsibly produced and achieve substantially environ-mentally superior results compared to fossil fuel are still the only real solution we have to reduce transport pollution.

How else does this Commission imagine reducing transport emissions? The hallways of the Commission may echo with the solution of electric vehicles. But, as produced and charged today, electric vehicles are carbon-intensive, because they rely on coal and other fossil-fuel-based electricity to be charged. In shrinking in the face of Europe’s lop-sided and unhealthy debate around biofuel, this Commission is failing to give the support needed by types of biofuel that are sustainable, such as Brazilian sugarcane-based ethanol, that can achieve large reductions of greenhouse-gas emission compared to fossil fuel and that have been proven time and again to have minimal direct and indirect environmental impacts.

Investors are unlikely to risk their money to develop new generations of sustainable types of biofuel without reasonable and binding EU public policy targets that can help mitigate the high-risk and high-cost process of producing advanced biofuel at scale. In this year of great EU institutional change, we hope that the new policy actors who will arrive in Brussels will have the foresight and fortitude to address Europe’s great decarbonisation in transport problems. This means, in part, creating a binding target for advanced types of biofuel that will lead both to greater volumes of such types of biofuel being produced and fewer vehicle emissions in Europe.